I'm pretty late to the party but I think we missed a few tips here:
Battleships need to focus down the catapults. A single AP volley will kill a catapult. Destroyers need to stay alive. Torps are the only thing that can reliably kill Rasputin. Cruisers should only use HE. Best strategy with cruisers is to fire HE at one ship until there are two fires and it uses Damage Control. Then you switch to a second target and light two fires. Then you switch back to the first and light your fires again, and then back to the other and relight your fires once more. This is easily 150k to 200k damage every game
Winning isn't that important, what matters more is getting those camos! Each camo is like winning an extra game in Random Battles and you can get 3 per run in the Halloween mode, that's nuts! Remember that you just need to kill 2 ships and do at least 100k damage to get all 3. This is much easier to do in the destroyers and cruisers. No matter how tempting it is, don't go back to kill the ships at the beginning! Stay with the Transylvania. If you want you can go clean them up after Rasputin is dead.

Yeah, ranked battles isn't perfect of course, but nothing is. Even in games that do have MMR based matching you're bound to get potatoes. You've only got to play a few hundred hours of Dota to realise that. It's just unfortunate that in Dota I was the potato haha.

I kind of look at Ranked Battles as skill based MM. It's not there all the time but occasionally I enjoy playing with potato teams anyway... As long as the potatoes are on the enemy team haha.
Although, mind you, I don't like the kind of game where your team wins so hard that no one gets more than 500 base XP and 80% of the enemy team is still alive.... That kind of victory is just awful.
Thankfully that sort of game is a lot rarer now than it used to be back in the Alpha/Beta days.

I've had some pretty good luck with the containers.
For a while I was only picking signal flag containers and my fifth one or something was 20 million credits.
I actually also got a normal non-super container where one of the three items was 4 captain slots which was pretty great.
I've recently started just trying my luck though and I got one super container with 250 flooding signal flags (that was about as meh as a super container could possibly be haha) and the next super container was a 10 million credit container.
Pretty happy with it so far, adds a bit of extra excitement

I'm not sure if this is a bug or intended design but I loaded into a game to test a mod and it broke my game and I had to quit to port. I then couldn't rejoin the game, it was saying my ship was still in battle.
This is despite the fact that my ship was at full HP and the game had only just started. Pretty poor way to toss my stats into the toilet IMO.

Well, on Friday I had an absolute trash day followed by absolute trash in World of Warships. Lost 4 games in a row in my Leningrad and did little to no damage in most of those games. I think the key is to not play in the first place if you're feeling worn out. But what I ended up doing was just quitting after the 4 losses in a row and coming back the next day feeling much better.

I consider myself a very good Russian DD captain and while, yes, the turret traverse is a bit awkward, you get used to it pretty quick. My recommendation here is to avoid using the Q and E keys to turn. A and D give you much more direct control of your ships rotation and you can easily make up for the turret rotation by just letting off the turn for a second.
Russian DDs excel in using their guns at mid to long range and can do significant amounts of damage with them. I have a Gnevny game under my belt with 133k damage, though granted, something like 50k of that was torpedoes.
The key to Russian DDs is to make sure you use AP against broadside targets (except other destroyers), even battleships. Against cruisers you can easily citadel them. I racked up 17 citadels in that game with the Gnevny.
Against battleships though, you need to hit their superstructure. As in the tower and smokestacks. Otherwise your shells will do little damage to their sides. Hitting a broadside battleship's superstructure will easily net you 2000+ damage per salvo. The only time you'll see good returns against battleship sides are when you're below 8km range but you better make sure the enemy battleship isn't looking at you if you're that close.
The main downfall of Russian destroyers is that the higher tier (7+) ships have very poor stealth for a destroyer (9km+ detection). This can lead to awkward situations when dancing with enemy DDs but that's not a low tier concern.
Once you get to the Gnevny, I recommend equipping the turret rotation module and using the expert marksman on your captain as this brings the rotation down from 35 seconds to something like 20-25 seconds which is much more reasonable. This is because the Gnevny has the worst turret traverse in the entire Russian DD line. I also recommend Vigilance over Superintendent as Russian smoke screens are pretty bad and generally I rely more on mobility and range to avoid damage than sitting in a smoke screen. Vigilance is very powerful and you spot torpedoes very early which helps because Russian DDs are so fast they can run straight into torpedoes. At this point, if you've been transferring your original captain up, you may also have enough points to grab Advanced Firing Training which will boost your range to an impressive 14-15km. I also recommend packing premium repair (since you won't have Last Stand with my Gnevny build) and premium speed boost (no Superintendent). You can drop the premium stuff if you don't have a premium account to save some of your credits as DD repair recharges very fast anyway.
American DDs are fun as well, but their guns are harder to use because their shells are much slower (700m/s versus 900m/s). I haven't played American DDs in a long time, and I'm probably a better shot now than I was before, but you'll find that they can struggle to hit enemy DDs that are manoeuvring. I believe the key here is to close the range. It's a lot harder to miss from 5km and less. American DDs also have satisfactory torpedoes and you should use them at any opportunity. American DDs will also find a lot of success in shooting from smokescreens (they have a very long duration smoke) and from behind islands (due to the high shell trajectory).
Once you've mastered Russian and American DDs, you'll look at Japanese DDs and consider them tasty snacks.
The skills you learn from Russian DDs transfer nicely to Japanese destroyers and their big, slow guns as well.

Well! That settles it then haha. Overwhelmingly seems like the accuracy mod is more popular. I'm buying it and mounting it right now
Thanks everyone! Really put my mind at ease. I have 10 million credits right now thanks to the newb rewards but I know how quick that can go when you're dropping 500k on mods!
Edit: Added the mod. My dispersion went from 223 to 207 so that's a 7.2% increase in accuracy. Awesome!

This is extremely interesting stuff. The incredibly detailed damage model in WoWS will never cease to amaze me. I was impressed by it during the alpha, and I'm still impressed by it now post-launch.
Not really too much that actually changes the way I play the game at all though but very cool to know how the background calculations work and why I can only heal a fraction of my battleship when I just took a massive 20,000 damage double citadel hit haha. I think it might be helpful to point out though that the repair party has an extremely easy to read indicator on exactly how much HP it will recover for you at any given point in time. If you look at your health bar on any ship with the repair party ability and you have taken damage, you'll notice that there's a grey area on your HP bar. That grey area is how much HP you will heal if you pop the damage repair party. Hence, it's not really relevant to know how the background calculations work but it is veeeery interesting to know why the damage repair ability seems to do barely anything at all in some cases and a lot in others.
Have to say though, I usually aimed at the middle of the ship from the deck to the water when engaging in close quarters and this guide has taught me to aim lower so thanks a lot for improving my game